H. Lewis Ulman
Associate Professor of English
Department of English
The Ohio State University ulman.1@osu.edu
Textual editing values reliability and accuracy above all, yet even the simplest re-mediation of text involves approximation, interpretation, inescapably interrelated gains and losses of information. For instance, in creating a word-processed copy of a handwritten document, the unique letterforms of script, each different even from another instance of the same letter in the same hand, are transliterated into the generic characters of a computer font, the physical uniqueness of the mark on the page riven into separate, standardized character and style encodings.
I regularly teach courses in which I collaborate with undergraduate and graduate students to produce multimodal electronic editions of previously unpublished nineteenth-century American manuscripts held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University. Like the one linked to below, these documentary editions are intended, in part, to provide wide exposure and access to manuscripts that might otherwise be difficult for readers to discover and consult, and to provide users with a variety of tools for studying those texts. More centrally for media studies, however, they provide readers and the student editors with opportunities to explore issues of textuality and mediation that arise when our cultural archives spread from page to screen and from library shelves and archives to networked databases. Electronic textual editing serves as our vehicle for examining what happens—and envisioning what might happen—when artifacts in one medium are represented in another medium, especially with regard to the interpretive work of reading or viewing. Electronic textual editions also provide a contact zone that can help us reflect on what manuscript, print, and "born digital" artifacts in various media can tell us about their relationships to one another and their unique properties.
We employ text, scanned images, photographs, audio, and video to explore how different media "witness" four dimensions of each project:
o the personal lives and historical milieus evoked by a text;
o the editorial theories and methods that shape our interpretation of a text;
o the material history and current state of physical artifacts (i.e., manuscripts); and
o the distinctive mediation of our chosen delivery technologies—the Internet and the screen.
If your interests run to the technologies employed in multimodal electronic editions like the one linked to below, I will be happy to discuss the following re-mediations:
o encoding the text of Cox's journal in XML;
o encoding custom views of archival images stored on an image server;
o encoding archival audio and video clips stored on a Quicktime streaming server;
o transforming XML files using Apache's Cocoon XML publishing system.
And do note that you can comment on the edition via a link on the project Web site. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions:
Multimodal Electronic Textual Editing
H. Lewis Ulman
Associate Professor of English
Department of English
The Ohio State University
ulman.1@osu.edu
Textual editing values reliability and accuracy above all, yet even the simplest re-mediation of text involves approximation, interpretation, inescapably interrelated gains and losses of information. For instance, in creating a word-processed copy of a handwritten document, the unique letterforms of script, each different even from another instance of the same letter in the same hand, are transliterated into the generic characters of a computer font, the physical uniqueness of the mark on the page riven into separate, standardized character and style encodings.
I regularly teach courses in which I collaborate with undergraduate and graduate students to produce multimodal electronic editions of previously unpublished nineteenth-century American manuscripts held in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at The Ohio State University. Like the one linked to below, these documentary editions are intended, in part, to provide wide exposure and access to manuscripts that might otherwise be difficult for readers to discover and consult, and to provide users with a variety of tools for studying those texts. More centrally for media studies, however, they provide readers and the student editors with opportunities to explore issues of textuality and mediation that arise when our cultural archives spread from page to screen and from library shelves and archives to networked databases. Electronic textual editing serves as our vehicle for examining what happens—and envisioning what might happen—when artifacts in one medium are represented in another medium, especially with regard to the interpretive work of reading or viewing. Electronic textual editions also provide a contact zone that can help us reflect on what manuscript, print, and "born digital" artifacts in various media can tell us about their relationships to one another and their unique properties.
We employ text, scanned images, photographs, audio, and video to explore how different media "witness" four dimensions of each project:
o the personal lives and historical milieus evoked by a text;
o the editorial theories and methods that shape our interpretation of a text;
o the material history and current state of physical artifacts (i.e., manuscripts); and
o the distinctive mediation of our chosen delivery technologies—the Internet and the screen.
If your interests run to the technologies employed in multimodal electronic editions like the one linked to below, I will be happy to discuss the following re-mediations:
o encoding the text of Cox's journal in XML;
o encoding custom views of archival images stored on an image server;
o encoding archival audio and video clips stored on a Quicktime streaming server;
o transforming XML files using Apache's Cocoon XML publishing system.
And do note that you can comment on the edition via a link on the project Web site. We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions:
"Journal of a Tour to Europe" (1851)
By Samuel Sullivan Cox, 1824–1889The following Web sites are best viewed with Safari 2.0 on Mac OS X or Internet Explorer on Windows (others may work but haven't been tested).
Project Web site: http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/ulman1/SSCoxJournal/
Edition: http://suse1.cohums.ohio-state.edu/tomcat/cocoon/eng569/SSCoxJournal.SSC_edintro
Edited by: MariaTeresa Beltran-Aponte, Frances Buschur, Katrina F. Cook, Jennifer Schneider, and H. Lewis Ulman